Alien (1979)

[Judderman]

Yeah Specimen was entertaining. Interesting, apparent job for the dog.
Harvest was decent. Neither of these brought much new, other than perhaps showing more examples of human exposure to Aliens than we might have thought, but they are good homages to Alien.

 

[Toby Frost]

Whilst watching them, I got the feeling of a really small pack of cards being shuffled. The Alien setting is tiny: there's a company, some workers, the Alien and not much else, and it becomes hard to do something new with the established canon. "Alone" got close to black comedy, and "Ore" tried a kind of proleterian solidarity (not terribly successfully, but it was a nice idea). "Specimen" was the only one of the films that made me think "I hadn't expected that, but now you've done it, it makes perfect sense".

 

[Vince W]

Here's a low budget remake. Not bad.

 

[Vladd67]

This may have been mentioned before, when I was a young I first saw Alien on TV and there was a scene where Ripley finds Dallas and it looks like he was being turned into an egg he says help me and she puts him out of his misery with a flame gun. Now I have seen this film many times since, streamed, video, dvd, blue ray, and on tv but I have never seen Dallas make reappearance after the alien grabs him. Does anyone else remember this scene? Always struck me as odd that itv would show t with what is obviously a deleted scene, maybe it was removed after the egg laying Queen was invented?

 

[BAYLOR]

I very Highly recommend Creature 1985. This film is Alien knock off but , its a pretty good.

It The Terror from Beyond Space 1958.

Planet of the Vampires 1965

 

[Toby Frost]

This may have been mentioned before, when I was a young I first saw Alien on TV and there was a scene where Ripley finds Dallas and it looks like he was being turned into an egg he says help me and she puts him out of his misery with a flame gun. Now I have seen this film many times since, streamed, video, dvd, blue ray, and on tv but I have never seen Dallas make reappearance after the alien grabs him. Does anyone else remember this scene? Always struck me as odd that itv would show t with what is obviously a deleted scene, maybe it was removed after the egg laying Queen was invented?

I think it was cut from the cinema version, but it is the biggest addition to the later Director's Cut. It's on a DVD version that I've got.

 

[Judderman]

I very Highly recommend Creature 1985. This film is Alien knock off but , its a pretty good.

Although it looks truly dreadful in quality I am impressed by the tag line. "Creature. It kills to live. And it lives..... to kill".

 

[KGeo777]

I like the idea of the aliens injecting victims and turning them into eggs but the scene kind of messes with the pacing. I much prefer that to the ant colony approach that Cameron tool. Aliens is ok but it's so dumbed down compared to A L I E N. Cameron had a lot of trouble filing in England. The tea time trolley lady drove him insane. He could not fathom crews taking a break for tea. In fact I don't think he has shot a movie in England since Aliens.

Alien 3 was bleak-I have yet to watch the alternate version people rave about. Alien 4 is ok but kind of disturbing. Ultimately I always go back to the first.

 

[paeng]

Some notable things about the movie:

It appears that at least most of the crew weren't that excited about discovering intelligent life, and were concerned more with monetization. Before that, over a meal, it looks like they were even annoyed by having to investigate the signal because it might cause them to lose their bonus for delivering the ore and refinery early.

Dallas tells Ripley that he doesn't know much about Ash because he replaced their original science officer only recently. Usually, when writers include such a point in the story, they don't do so for no reason at all. Later, after discovering the special order, Ripley tells the others that Ash was likely going to acquire the alien, alive and intact, for the company's bio-weapons division. That plus the replacement and the special order and even quarantine measures concerning dangerous organisms imply that there's precedence with encountering organisms, although probably not intelligent lifeforms.

Finally, if that's seen in light of Mother, then more questions appear. Commonsensically, it's the captain of the vessel that calls the shots, and the autopilot only follows instructions; the only one who can override the captain are the ship owners, i.e., the company. Thus, when Mother re-routes the Nostromo she does so only because she received prior instruction from the company or did so after reporting detection of the signal to the same. Either way, the company would have received or would have required the coordinates of the signal because it's a sign of intelligent life and because of the precedence mentioned earlier.

But the premise of the second movie is that the company knew nothing about what happened to the Nostromo or the location of the derelict craft.

 

[paeng]

Some more points about the movie, and in light of the prequels:

I didn't see or remember much of the latter, but I think David had been collecting all sorts of information about the Engineers, the aliens, spores, and so on, and relaying them to the company. Some works, meanwhile, reveal that the company only had some drawings of the aliens, and nothing more, which imply that they did not know anything about the aliens until the Nostromo detected the signal.

In the first movie, Ripley tells Ash that Mother had deciphered the transmission, and it looks like a warning. It's possible that it could decipher such because of information it had gathered thanks to David from the prequels. In which case, it wasn't exactly in the dark, and if it had known even the location of the derelict ship throughout, it would have made the events of the second movie irrelevant, if not illogical, because it would have visited the ship, collected the eggs (probably using drones and synths as those would not have activated the facehuggers), and even reverse-engineer any alien technology without waiting to find Ripley.

 

[CupofJoe]

My biggest issue with Alien...
Where is Jonesie when the crew are in hyper sleep?
Is he in one of the pods with someone?

 

[Judderman]

There has been discussion online on an earlier script version that Jonesie was taken out of hyper sleep by Ripley when she woke. Well cared for cat!

 

[paeng]

I read later in one manual that the reason why they all need cryo-sleep even for voyages that aren't really that long is because the ships use tachyon shunt drives for FTL travel, which means time also accelerates. They have to be in cryo-sleep or else they'd age rapidly.

 

[BAYLOR]

I read later in one manual that the reason why they all need cryo-sleep even for voyages that aren't really that long is because the ships use tachyon shunt drives for FTL travel, which means time also accelerates. They have to be in cryo-sleep or else they'd age rapidly.

Wouldn't that affect the ship too ?

 

[Vladd67]

Around the time Alien came out 2000AD had a story called Robo Hunter. In the first episode the shields on the hero's ship were sabotaged causing him for some reason to become younger. This was because his employers wanted the younger fitter Robo Hunter not the aging person he had become, sadly for the pilot of the ship he was also made younger become a foul mouthed baby with the mind of an adult.

 

[paeng]

Wouldn't that affect the ship too ?

It's said to turn the ship and its contents into "mirror image tachyons," but I'm guessing that the acceleration process still affects human beings, which is why they have to be in cryo-sleep even for shorter trips (like three-week one in the second movie).

 

[paeng]

Here's an update on the events that took place in the movie, and how they create interesting issues for the franchise:

While the Nostromo is docked in Thedus, the science officer is replaced by Ash.

Later, Ripley joins the crew (because she didn't know that the science officer was replaced by Ash).

Mother detects the signal and re-routes the Nostromo.

Dallas tells the crew that they have to investigate the signal because it's a distress call and a sign of intelligent life.

While crew members investigate the location of the signal, Ripley receives a report from Mother stating that the signal was deciphered and looks like a warning, not a distress call.

After the facehugger falls off of Kane, Dallas tells Ripley that he doesn't know anything about Ash because he replaced their science officer.

After Ripley discovers the company special order, she tells the surviving crew about it and that the company likely wanted the creature for its bio-weapons division.

Points by various fans:

Some believe that the company replaced the science officer with Ash because they knew about the signal, and because of what happened in the prequels. But that also means that they had the location of the signal beforehand. If so, then there would have been no need for them to get that location from the flight recorder in Ripley's lifeboat almost sixty years later. They would have sent more ships to investigate it even as they built a colony on the same rock thirty years after the Nostromo was lost.

It's generally the ship captain that calls the shots. That means Mother would not re-route the Nostromo unless she received specific instructions to do so from the company, the owners of the ship and the ones who could override Dallas. If so, then that means that Mother was in communication with it, and that it would have known what was happening inside the Nostromo before it blew up.

Usually, companies don't spent a lot of money to come up with things like bio-weapons divisions unless there's a need for them. That means they were encountering similar organisms in other places or encountered the same aliens in the past. If employees like Ripley knew about such divisions, then what does that say about people in that world that must have been encountering similar in various worlds? (In the second movie, one board member said that they had not seen anything like what Ripley describes in over 300 worlds, while the Marines talk about dealing with "Arcturians".)

The second prequel is set less than twenty years before Alien, and the third prequel would have probably been set between the two. How much information did the company gather from events that took place in the prequel? How much did it know before it replaced the Nostromo science officer, etc.?